New tussle over police training to deal with mentally ill

A new course to train more San Francisco police officers on ways to deal with the mentally ill is “just lip service to nothing,” an angry police commissioner told department officials Wednesday.

The fiery comments from Commissioner Petra DeJesus came after Assistant Chief Denise Schmitt told the commission that the department was ready to begin a scaled-back program on how best to handle unstable suspects without using their guns.

At least two disturbed men have been shot by officers already this year, one fatally.

The new monthly class, which begins in February, will provide 24 hours of training to 360 officers a year. It replaces a quarterly 40-hour course that was discontinued in June after 10 years, at least partly for financial reasons.

That didn’t sit well with DeJesus, who complained that the delay in providing that training to all 2,200 or so officers showed the department’s lack of commitment to changing the way it handles it’s dealings with the mentally ill.

“In the mental health community they don’t shoot these people, they don’t (use Tasers on) these people,” she said. Does the department “really have a commitment to training our officers?”

Under the new system, three times as many officers will receive the needed training each year as before, but there has to be a balance, Schmitt said.

The training “means scheduling officers away from the street,” she added. “This has to be done at a measured pace that the stations and investigative bureaus can handle.”

Neither side left the half-hour discussion satisfied, instead agreeing to bring the subject back before the commission for a longer discussion.